Ex­am­ple Mark Knopfler Style

[Bar 1] Although this ap­pears to be a stan­dard ver­sion of the clas­sic blues riff the magic re­ally comes from the pick­ing hand in or­der to achieve the driv­ing sound. Strike the chords marked ‘m’ with the sec­ond fin­ger nail or the nails of the ‘i, m, a’ fin­gers. This is sim­i­lar to a banjo tech­nique known as ‘frail­ing’ and the nail hit­ting the string will give the per­cus­sive, dead­ended sound if you re­lease the pres­sure on the fret­ting hand just after. [Bar 8] To sound th­ese two A5 chords try strik­ing the first one with the down­ward flick of the sec­ond fin­ger nail then pluck the fol­low­ing A5 chord by quickly drag­ging the first fin­ger up the strings, to­wards your face. [Bar 9] On this D chord, mute the first string so it doesn’t sound - do it by lightly flat­ten­ing the inside of the fret­ting hand fin­gers against the string - it re­quires a re­laxed fret­ting hand so you don’t ac­ci­den­tally fret a note.